The 2nd generation Intel SSD upgrades its firmware for TRIM

For

Against

Intel's update support

When Intel decides to take on a technological challenge, it doesn't arse about. Nope, it crushes the problem with military force.

However, with Intel's might also comes a lumbering clumsiness. On occasion, you can see the massive bureaucracy struggle to change direction in response to events. So it was with Intel's early SSDs, which suffered from rapidly degrading performance.

More recently, Intel made it known that owners of its first generation drives wouldn't receive the update to support the TRIM command. Not cool.

The next generation

This second generation 160GB X24-M drive did, of course, get the TRIM update. In the mean time, the X25-M's established strengths in terms of random read and write performance remain.

For proof, observe the solid 4K benchmark numbers and competitive real-world app results. Despite the relatively lowly sub-100MB/s sequential write performance, this is still a quick drive and one that performs very well in our overall value, performance and capacity index.

The results are even more impressive when you consider that our test drive isn't box fresh.